For nearly 75 years, Grange Insurance has offered competitive products and services to policyholders in more than a dozen U.S. states. To maintain its well-earned reputation and standing, the company decided to enhance its rating engine—a software tool for rating policies and performing what-if modeling, impact analyses, and other vital activities. Working with the Sophic Group and using the Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System development environment and Microsoft Visual F# programming language, Grange Insurance parallelized its rating engine to take better advantage of multicore server hardware, and in so doing garnered significant performance benefits. Processes that used to require hours now take just minutes, enabling the company to trim time-to-market by weeks and making it far easier for independent agents to sell and service Grange products.

Precision.BI needed powerful analysis and reporting components for its healthcare business intelligence solution. The company found what it needed in third-party components from GrapeCity, including functionality that enables users to explore huge quantities of data and to generate rich reports on an ad hoc basis. Precision.BI plans to continue taking advantage of GrapeCity’s rich components and excellent support as both companies migrate their software to Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3.

With an important trade show only two months away, automated microanalysis solution provider ASPEX Corporation had only a short time to add rich reporting and graphing functionality to its Perception MQA (Metal Quality Analyzer) software. The company used ComponentOne Studio for WinForms 2008—a suite of more than 60 .NET Framework components—to quickly and easily add the desired functionality in only six weeks, meeting its deadline and saving roughly 75 percent in software development costs.

During Super Bowl week, more than a half-million people converge on the host city, which has an enormous responsibility to ensure the security and smooth flow of events for visitors, as well as citizens of the city. The 2009 Super Bowl required the Tampa Police Department (TPD) to coordinate 25 regional and national agencies in a coordinated security effort. The TPD deployed an integrated command and control platform based on Microsoft® technologies and developed by Microsoft Gold Certified Partner E•SPONDER. Using these IT tools, the TPD was able to plan and run a successful security operation for Super Bowl XLIII, while delivering a reduction in labor costs versus budget thanks to efficient resource allocation.

Switzerland’s leading telecommunications provider Swisscom wanted a cost-effective dashboard tool to help its employees to monitor compliance issues with service level agreements (SLAs) without reviewing paper-based reports. Swisscom rejected business analytics solutions from other major vendors because they were over specified, required third-party support, and were expensive to license. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Kull, Swisscom deployed Microsoft Office PerformancePoint® Server 2007 for the dashboard, providing analysis reports of SLA fulfilment from more than 200 IT systems. Managers now see reports on performance against SLAs in near real time, instead of spending days scrutinising paper-based reports. As a result, supervisors make more effective and timely decisions using up-to-date information.

The Russian Federation's National Emergency Management Centre's new emergency communications system is an automated solution built around Microsoft software. A fundamental component of the system is Microsoft BizTalk Server, which makes it possible to integrate a myriad of information systems into a unified space. This achieves the key goal of building a system that allows rapid management of large amounts of resources through the Centre's complex hierarchical structure and across huge territorial expanses.